Mountains, Convicts, and roadkill

That's Tassy for ya'. Starting with the mountains, they were fabulous. It felt a bit like Montana in that everywhere you look in the distance, there were huge peaks in the background. Driving through them was a bit different though. The roads in Australia are nothing like the states. You really appreciate the infrastructure that we have in place when you drive a one lane "interstate" (I'm doing the quote things in the air in that one) with a cliff on one side and a rock wall on the other. Then someone comes from the other side. You pretty much have to come within inches of falling off the cliff while they come within inches of smahing into the rock wall just so that we can let each other pass. Also, I am pretty sure we saw every species of animal alongside the road in Tasmania as well, of course they were pretty much hamburger so it wasn't as fabulous as our Koala sightings. Just for the record, we did not kill any of these animals though. Our kill count still stands at one Kangaroo and that only counts as half because I wasn't driving.
The day we cruised the east coast was a bit of a bummer, the rain really fell so we were unable to do any bushwalking. We just drove up took a picture then headed to the next stop. The weather on Sunday was much better though and gave a the chance to see Port Arthur. This was a 1800's convict settlement that is now a major tourist stop. The setting was stunning. A beautiful little valley with a nice harbour and green fields. It is almost hard to imagine that this was such a nasty place. Nikki contends that I have watched "Oz" and prison movies too much and it probably wasn't as bad as I think. But consider this, there was an island (called "Isle of the Dead") that was no more than 20 yards by 20 yards that buried 1100 people (that is what they have records of). This isn't the ones that were sentenced to death but people that died doing labor, or just died due to crap conditions. Either way, it wasn't exactly a walk in the park.
On Sunday night we stayed at a Girl's house in Hobart that I found on Couchsurfing. In case you haven't heard of it, couchsurfing is a website that connects people that have a place to stay with travellers. I have known about it for a few years and thought it was a great idea, but I really didn't have the guts to do it. For fear they might be weirdos and I would end up staying in some potheads nasty 4 dollar beer stained couch. This couldn't have been further from the truth. The house we stayed in was fantastic. Our host was as friendly and intelligent as could be and served us dinner and wine. There were also two other surfers there (a French-Canadian and a New Yorker) that were teachers so the conversation went on late into the night. What a fun experience!
Our last day, we checked out Australia's oldest brewery (Cascade), then walked around Hobart. Overall, a very fun trip!